Fighting Fake News Together: When We Is Greater Than Me

Fake news has always existed, however with the rise of the internet, it has grown into a global crisis. The spread of fake news has a viral effect spreading at a higher rate than real news. It has destroyed people’s lives, businesses and reputations, while lining the pockets of others for political, financial and business greed. It is time, that we the PEOPLE, take action — TOGETHER.

At Proof, we want to help identify those fake new sources by getting everyone involved. We are building a platform that relies on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, to vote on the facts of online content. Crowd wisdom has been studied and tested by many, including Plato, Vernon Smith and Sir Francis Galton and made popular in James Surowiecki’s book titled the Wisdom of Crowds. Basically, these studies have found that a large group’s combined answers to questions has been found to be as good as, and often superior to, the answer given by any one of the individuals within the group.

Years of research have proven that under the right conditions, crowds will answer correctly the majority of the time. What are these right conditions?

Surowiecki outlines several conditions that are necessary for a crowd to be “smart.

Diversity: they must be diverse, so that participants are bringing different pieces of information to the table,

Decentralized: No one person at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer.

Independence: Be independent, so that each person focuses on information rather than the opinions of others

According to a very interesting article provided by Princeton University in Phys.org, they state that “Democratic methods, however, tend to favor the most popular information, not necessarily the most correct. The ignorance of the masses can cancel out a knowledgeable minority with specialized information of a topic, resulting in the wrong answer becoming the most accepted”. Therefore, rather than watching people spread fake news because they think it is correct, we have decided to incentivize people to read, research and cast a blind vote on the facts of that content before it spreads virally. Basically, the voters will be incentivized to vote on the facts, and disincentivized to vote against the facts. The goal of Proof is to rejuvenate the crowd to do what is right, by finding the truth.

Drawing on the literature of the wisdom of crowds and properly aligned incentives, we carefully constructed a voting mechanism that elicits the truth from a group of diverse, independent and decentralized voters, while attempting to create a better world for all.

How can you help end this global crisis? Join our community at www.proofmedia.io and be the first to test the alpha version — coming Dec. 2018. We are giving free “Proofs” to the first 1000 testers — sign up today and help us end fake news. For more information about alpha testing, read the article titled “Hate Fake News, We Have a Solution, You Can Help” on our website. We’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and suggestions.